When the crash had come Mr. Hobson had put a bold face on it, and his wife had behaved nobly. She had given up the confined home in which she had been so happy without a murmur, and had bought every stick of furniture that she could cram into a large house. She had bought silks and laces, furs and jewels, for herself, and clothed her young children in the richest attire; and she had given up without flinching the household work in which she had taken such a delight, and engaged a large staff of servants. All Mr. Hobson's debtors had been allowed to pay him in full, and he and his family had retired to their mansion, with a name free of all reproach, it is true, but to such misery as only people of refinement could experience from such a change in their surroundings.
And that was not the worst. Mr. Hobson was a kind husband and an affectionate father. But he had the gambler's fever in his blood, and the hard lesson he had received had not sufficed to purge him of it. Since his downfall he had continued to speculate, but with no greater success than before, and it was much to be feared that unless some help came to him, not only he, but his blameless wife and his innocent young children, would sink into yet deeper depths of degradation, and be obliged at last to go to the playhouse.
Mrs. Perry had come home one afternoon from a round of her district, full of the troubles of the Hobsons. Mr. Hobson had broken out again, and had risked a small fortune, not this time in mining, but in a patent for increasing the amount of petrol to be used in motor-cars. His excuse was that he had some mechanical knowledge, and had spotted an error in the invention which he thought would make it useless. But, unfortunately, he had mentioned his discovery to others, the errors had been pointed out to the patentees, and they had succeeded in putting them right. Or, as was darkly hinted, there had been no error at all, and Mr. Hobson had fallen into a trap. But, in any case, he had had to realise at a high figure, and had come out of the deal more overloaded with wealth than ever.
We had all sympathised deeply over the picture of misery that Mrs. Perry had drawn. Mr. Hobson, she said, was overcome with remorse, and like a man distracted. He had sat in his overfurnished dining-room with his head in his hands, while his wife, scintillating with diamonds, though it was early in the afternoon, had tried to comfort him, her face pale but full of courage. It had been almost insupportable to hear the children crying at the table loaded with provisions, and to think that the father, the bread-loser of the family, was powerless to help them.